


THE GRUDGE

by impulsewriter (trilogycal)



Series: S8 [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: ;), ALL TAGS THAT APPLY TO THE EPISODE APPLY TO THIS AS WELL, Alien Biology, Alien Character(s), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s08e05 The Grudge, F/F, F/M, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Lance (Voltron) is a Good Boyfriend, Mutual Pining, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Realistic injuries, Space Dad Shiro (Voltron), Spoilers, Star Trek References, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, a brief nod to, as in: alteans are more than just space humans with pointy ears & magic powers, i miss alien ty lee :(, including:, unedited bc we die like men, use of a single (1) curse word
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-02
Updated: 2019-03-02
Packaged: 2019-11-07 08:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17957285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trilogycal/pseuds/impulsewriter
Summary: Off the cusp of a lead on the Robeasts, Team Voltron makes plans to rendezvous with the Atlas, but a mysterious adversary with a vendetta interferes.rewrite of s8ep5! aka, So I'm Really Doing This, Huh?





	THE GRUDGE

**Author's Note:**

> i started on this, wrote about 4k of it, abandoned it for about two months, then came back and finished the other 8k in one day. i hope the rift isn't too obvious?

* * *

 

_“….the Baltuf Nebula would make a good rendezvous point for both of us.”_

_“Send us the coordinates, Coran. Barring anything that tries to kill us, we should meet you there at about a dobosh.”_

_“Roger that, Keith. We’ll see you when we see you. Stay out of trouble, please?”_

_“I’ll do what I can. See you, Shiro.”_

A grin crawled onto a mysterious face, gleaming white teeth shining in the light of a monitor. “You hear that, Captain?” someone asked mischievously, pushing back their chair to beam back toward the bridge. “The Baltuf Nebula. Interesting location for a meet-up spot, eh?”

To strangers and outsiders, the Captain remained stone-faced. But those who know where to look, the ghost of a smirk lingered on their lips. “Yes, I heard. Set coordinates for the Baltuf Nebula. And, while you’re at it, work on some interference.”

“Yes, sir!”  They whirled around in their chair, cracking their spindly fingers. “Any special requests?”

The Captain’s smirk grew minutely. “In fact, I know just the thing.”

 

* * *

 

_“Paladins, do you copy?”_

Keith sat up a little in his seat at the sound of Shiro’s familiar voice. “I read you, Shiro,” he replied, opening the requested channel almost immediately. “What’s wrong? Got stumped on your crossword puzzle again?”

 _“…yes. But, that’s n.. ..e issue here.”_ Shiro’s voice wavered toward the middle, a crackle of interference breaking up his words. Pidge corrected their sensors without being asked, adjusting the frequency. _“Our far-range sensors have located some hostile Galra activity within the Baltuf Nebula, so I have decided to change the rendezvous point. Sending you the coordinates now.”_

Keith shifted his gaze over to the left, where the new coordinates began to ping.

He could almost hear the frown in Pidge’s curious voice. “The Akog Nebula? In Zeta Aquilae System?? That’s a 31 minute detour from our original rendezvous point.”

“If there’s Galra activity near the first rendezvous point,” Lance pointed out, “then why would we want to go there, 31 minute detour or otherwise?” The sound of him stretching came through their connection, the faint sound of joints popping reaching Keith’s ears. “I dunno about you guys, but I’d rather skip the inevitable skirmish we’d face against those patrol ships, eh?”

“Lance makes a solid point,” Keith said, adjusting his grip on the controls. “Besides, fighting that patrol would take 31 minutes anyway. It’d conserve energy to just go to this new point.” He reached forward to key in the new coordinates. On the viewfinder, the Lion’s course changed, the straight purple arrow curving slightly off to the right. “Paladins, change trajectory. We’ll see you in about an hour, Shiro.”

_“Affirmative, Keith.”_

Shiro’s voice cut out seamlessly, Altean technology making the cut-off nigh unnoticeable. Keith leaned back in his chair and sighed, loosening his grip on the handles. Quiet took over for an amount of time that Keith didn’t keep track of, a void of sound filled with nothing but the beep of his dashboard and the sound of his own fidgeting.

“So… about that crossword puzzle you mentioned?” Hunk asked. Their ETA was 10 minutes, to Keith’s surprise. He tended to forget just how fast the Lions traveled. “Is Shiro really stuck on it?”

“Yeah, what’s the clue?” Lance added. “I love crosswords. I used to do them with my _Mima_ and Pop-pop all the time.”

“’What may be resorted to when words fail’,” Keith recited, “seven letters. Second letter is a C, second-to-last is an N.”

“Actions,” Lance said. “You’re welcome.”

“Duly noted, granny,” Pidge teased. “First you knit, now you do crossword puzzles? What next, you’ll wear curlers in your hair and tell us all to eat more?”

Hunk gleefully chimed in, “Lance is Team Grandma! I never knew!”

 “If I’m Team Grandma, then does that makes Allura Team Grandpa?” Lance asked. “She _does_ know how to play dominoes and lecture me about my life choices!”

“I do _not_ lecture you, Lance,” Allura promptly cut in, her voice sounding oddly tight and tense compared to the levity of her teammates. “Although, I probably _should_ , considering you’ve spent more time in a healing pod out of any of us!”

“Ooh, someone’s in trouble!” Lance crooned, deadpanning a second later. “It’s me. I don’t know why I did that.”

“Okay, team, cut it out,” Keith interrupted. “Let’s not start. Pidge, we’re coming up on our rendezvous point. Give me some intel on this planet.”

“Sure thing, Chief.” Her face winked into view on the right side of his screen, casting a faint green glow over his black dashboard. “Atmospheric readings indicate 89% CO2, 10% oxygen, 1% trace elements of nitrogen, methane, sulfur and helium, all due to strong volcanic activity. Oddly enough, surface temperature only reads about 305.3 degrees Kelvin away from the volcanoes. That’s about 90 degrees Fahrenheit for you Americans in the audience. So, in other words, keep your suits on. That means you, Lance.”

“Hey! That was one time, and it was for a really good reason!”

“Oh, was it? Because from what I can recall, you just wanted to fix your hair,” Allura interjected, weirdly snippy.

 “It was in my eyes. I couldn’t see! How am I supposed to see through _hair_ , huh?”  

“Focus, team,” Keith reminded them. “Converge in landing formation. We’ll wait for the Atlas on the surface.” The Lions joined up around him, and they pierced the thin atmosphere with Black at the lead. Keith wordlessly led them toward a relatively flat plateau, composed of mainly ash and dust.

Just as Black got settled on the ground, her claws sinking into the soft soot, Pidge’s voice quipped from the comms. “Hey, there they are!”

Keith turned to the viewfinder, watching the massive hybrid ship lower into the atmosphere. “Atlas, we have visual!” he announced, having quickly opened up a general channel, a small smile crossing his face.

“Finally, a small mission where nothing went wrong,” Lance sighed, Red to Keith’s right shifting in place. “It’s almost too good to be true!”

Suddenly, the sky around the IGF-Atlas appeared to flicker, panels of purple winking in and out of view around the ship. A curved red line appeared on the side of the hull, part of a familiar insignia that made Keith’s heart sink. “Lance, I think you just hexed us!” he heard Hunk cry out, as the IGF-Atlas vanished in a flash of glitches, a Galra war vessel appearing in its place. 

A bulb of red light powered up between the prongs of the warship, energy crackling off of it. “Paladins, get airborne immediately!” Keith ordered, shoving Black’s handles forward in their tracks and depressing the booster buttons at his thumbs. “It’s a trap!”

The Lions scattered just as a huge ray of burgundy-colored energy was blasted from the prongs, a whump of compressed air escaping as the beam struck the earth. Keith grit his teeth as the air in the cockpit grew thicker, heavier, weighing down on his body. Shapes fell out of the sky around him, the other Lions being dragged down to the ground, and Keith leaned forward, urging Black’s boosters to supercharge. Their connection thrummed with her own desperation, mirroring his urgency to escape, and Keith cried out as Black left his mind abruptly, going dark.

She slammed into the ground before he could prepare himself, the last Lion to fall.

“It’s just like when we were captured by those pirates!” Hunk yelled, raising his voice over the hum of the tractor beam around them.

“We’re about to be captured by pirates _again_!” Lance shouted, struggling to lift Red’s head up off the ground.

Keith desperately glanced around the cockpit, eyes wide as he shoved at the manual handles, yielding no results. “Emergency ejection!” he commanded, his voice growing a bit higher than he would’ve liked. He slammed his fist down on a rarely-used button near the back of Black’s dashboard and shot up from his chair, racing toward the back of her head. A ladder descended from some unseen slot in the Lion, halting suddenly about halfway down, and Keith leaped up to it. His hands secured the bottom rung, the momentum of his jump making his legs swing, and he used the forward motion to haul himself upward, the hatch in the Lion’s head sliding open as he neared.

Keith jumped off of the top of Black’s head, using her snout as a run-up before he leaped. He activated his jetpack about halfway through the fall, softening the drop, and he tucked into a shoulder roll to preserve the momentum as he landed. Emerging from the roll, Keith boosted away from Black, escaping the cloying pull of the tractor beam in record time, the rush of more jetpacks behind him.

The plateau they’d landed on was surrounded by long, dusty plains that edged out into dead woodlands, full of burnt trunks and sharp rock formations. Keith headed toward it, eyeing the rock outcroppings just on the edge of the clearing. He gritted his teeth as the air shifted, the sounds of laser fire powering up.

“Atlas, come in!” Allura’s voice sounded frustrated with panic in his ear as she tried to hail their flagship, just as the first lasers struck the earth mere feet beside them, impacting the ground and sending ash and dirt exploding through the air, leaving smoldering craters behind.

“Atlas, we’re under heavy fire!” Keith yelled, jumping a few feet away from the nearest explosion and continuing toward the woodlands. More lasers hit just ahead of them, and he dodged around it, holding up his arm to shield his view from the dirt raining down upon them. “Atlas, do you copy?!”

“The Atlas isn’t receiving our communications!” Pidge shouted. “Otherwise they’d respond!”

“This way!” Keith redirected his focus from the hopeless note in her tone, boosting toward a cluster of dead trees, several blackened trunks toppled over each other to form a makeshift lean-to. He huddled against the wall of a huge tree trunk, throwing an arm over Pidge to keep her low as she hid with him, glancing at Hunk as the yellow paladin kneeled behind him. Lance coerced Allura into a crouch and stood in front of her, his bayard materializing in his hands. Explosions continued to rock the dead world around them, Galra laser fire shot into the woodlands around them. After several moments of siege, the fighter passed over their location, ceasing fire. The Paladins peered around the edges of their hiding spot, a convenient clearing in the tree branches framing the warship for their view, a halo of light shimmering around the origin of the tractor beam.

“We must have been set up.” Allura grabbed onto Lance’s arm, clutching it almost absentmindedly. He huddled a little closer to her, similarly motivated by instinct, distracted with observing the warship. “But by whom..?”

“Guys, we have incoming!” Pidge yelled, raising her head to call out to Lance and Allura across from them. “It’s small, fast, and closing in!”

A rapid beeping sound filled the quiet air, growing louder and more quick as it neared. A pyramid-shaped drone hovered into view and pivoted right as they made eye contact with it, and fired a blast right at Lance’s and Allura’s hiding spot, sending them running with a pair of screams. It twisted to take aim at the other three. “ _Scatter_!” Keith shouted, spinning on his heel and boosting away from the blast, just as it landed where he would have previously been standing. He led the charge toward a truly massive tree, boosting up and over it to land had on the other side.

Each laser fired with precision, avoided just by the skin on their heels. “We need to lose this thing!” Hunk yelled, panting heavily. He grunted as the ground exploded just in front of him, and he charged through the aftermath, shielding his face against the cloud of ash.

“What can we do to throw it off our scent?!” Lance asked, lanky legs carrying him in long strides.

“I’ve got an idea!” Pidge answered, boost-jumping up the steep slope of a trunk. “But I’d need a minute!”

“I’ll buy you some time!” Hunk jumped up onto a criss-crossing trunk with his jetpack, skidding to a stop atop the slanted surface. His bayard materialized with a flash of yellow light, and he swung the cannon around, firing at dead trunks. Yellow-colored turrets stuck to the trees, rotating toward the pursuing drone almost on a dime. They pelted the thing, and Hunk joined in with his larger lasers, shouting as he mercilessly fired at the dangerous drone. Lance stepped up to join him, letting loose his own battle cry.

Allura and Keith activated their shields around Pidge, allowing her to crouch down and access her arm display. With a series of beeps, fingers flying fast across a diagram of a Paladin suit, she whooped and lowered her arm. “Got it!” she announced, standing up. “That thing shouldn’t be able to detect us anymore!”

Lance stopped firing, hefting his assault rifle up onto one shoulder. “Then let’s get out of here!”

Hunk lowered his cannon, and with a silent command, the turrets ceased their siege on the drone. An oval-shaped bubble shimmered around the drone, reinforced hexagons protecting it, but once the firing stopped, the shield melded away, revealing the sleek, evil version of their old friend Rover, untouched.  Hunk reluctantly let his bayard retreat into its dormant form as it sailed forward once more, floating toward them in a series of warbles. It passed over them, but slowed to a stop some distance away.

It spun in a slow circle, the red sensor in the middle of its abdomen flickering. Keith felt the faint tingling sensation of being watched just before the alarming sound of a rapid series of beeps filled the air once more. The drone powered up with a whir, and Keith managed to pop off a shout just before it began to fire again, sending them scattering.

Allura was the first to dive behind the caved-in body of a hill, huddling up against the crest of dirt. Keith skidded to a stop just beside her, summoning his shield without a second thought. Pidge, Lance and Hunk sat across from them, their own shields drawn. “Grr – we need something to draw its fire!”

“I’ve got it!” Allura scrambled away from his side, disappearing around the edge of their cover before Keith could call out to her, bayard materializing in hand. Keith peered around the open edge of the hill, under the glow of his shield, and watched her glowing whip wrap around the trunk of a tree. The drone spun in place just in time to watch her body-slam the tree, easily dodging out of the way as it fell.

While it was turned, Keith scrambled out of cover and up onto the hill, summoning his own bayard. With a mighty yell, he sent the blade soaring, the mysterious metal singing as it spun through the air, arcing way off to the side. It sailed past the drone, but crooked back around the catch its side, slicing through its wing and cutting clear into its abdomen.

The Paladins whooped and cheered as the drone clattered to the ground, nothing more than smoking, sparking wreckage. Keith dropped to the ground with a grunt as his knees protested, straightening up. He reached out to his bayard, and it reappeared in his hand, back in its dormant form.

“Huh. Good job, Keith.” Lance approached him and shrugged widely, voice coated in a comical arrogance. Keith felt his expression grow sour at the nonchalance; yeah, _good job, Keith_. Sure. “I mean, I was just about to do that, too, but that’s cool.”

The both of them glanced back at Pidge as she piped up, “I might be able to hack into this thing,” and brushed between them, eyes firmly affixed on the wreckage. She kneeled down in front of it and raised her arm, ready to commence scanning, but Hunk stepped up.

“Hold on, Pidge!” He raised his own arm, and a stream of white foam shot from his gauntlet, spraying onto the small electronic fire smoldering on the remains of the drone. “Safety first.”

Pidge deadpanned as he extinguished the fire. Once he declared it fit to examine, stepping back and bowing with theatrical effect – rolling her eyes as Lance clapped from his spot leaned up against a tree, always one for dramatics – she scanned the dead drone meticulously, skimming over the readings as they trickled in. “This is Galra tech, but it looks like it’s been infused with Olkari elements,” she declared after the last readings came in. She opened up a window and gestured to some point on the screen, oblivious to the clueless looks Lance and Keith swapped in the background. “The sub-atomic micro-filament is single-modulated before it goes through its attenuator! Wow!”

“So,” Hunk said, “it’s pretty amazing, huh?”

“Yeah, absolutely!”

“Oh, would you look at that, it’s single-modulated, not double-modulated.” He nodded imperiously. “Wow.”

“Oh, shut up, Hunk,” Pidge grumbled, exasperated by their ongoing nerd feud. Rolling her eyes, she shook her head and continued. “This thing has been locking onto the key encryption protocol that’s been installed into our suits and bayards.”

“How did they get that?” Keith asked a little hoarsely.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Only a genius could do it.”

“Well, if that means what I think it means, then we’re being tracked through our suits.” Lance pushed himself off of the tree and trudged over, folding his arms. “Is there any way we can just… turn off the key encryption?”

“Negative,” Pidge confirmed. “And if this drone had the key, then so does that cruiser and anyone on it.” She straightened up from her kneeling position, glancing back at the rest of them. “If we want to avoid detection, then we need to lose our suits, and our bayards.”

“Remove our armor?” Allura asked, somewhat derisively. “In this place?”

“Where we can’t breathe?” Hunk continued. “CO2 high, oxygen low, pretty hot degrees Kelvin? We wouldn’t survive more than a few hours, and that’s pushing it.”

Keith turned back toward the drone. It sparked one last time under his steely gaze. “At this rate,” he said, gesturing to it, “we might survive longer without ‘em.”

Lance grimaced. “So, keep our suits on and risk getting blasted? Or ditch the armor and try to live long enough before dying poisoned air?” He crossed his arms and sighed, long and heavy, never feeling more like Team Grandma than in this moment. “Decisions, decisions.” His eyes flickered over to Keith, who stood turned away from them, head raised. “What do you think we should do, Keith?”

Keith’s eyes shimmered as he stared off at the horizon, mouth drawn into a severe frown. “We need to lose the suits, if we’re being tracked through them,” he said distantly, caught in a reverie as he watched a plume of smoke trail into the sky from the crater of the volcano. “You guys head toward the Lions and try to figure out how to un-trap them.”

Lance quirked an eyebrow. “And what are you gonna do?” he asked sarcastically. “Get your nails done?”

“I’m gonna lure the people who are tracking us away from you guys,” Keith said.

Lance’s expression changed, smirk fading fast. “I’m coming with you,” he said instantly, walking forward to stand at Keith’s side. “It’s too dangerous to go alone.”

Keith frowned, turning to face him fully. “Absolutely not, Lance,” he rejected. “I need you to stay with the others.”

“But I’m the diversion guy, remember, genius?” Lance reached over and rapped his fist against Keith’s helmet.

“And I’m the guy who’s had the most experience doing dangerous solo stuff,” Keith snapped. “Remember?”

“Keith, Lance,” Hunk tried to interject.

“We can’t lose our leader, Keith,” Lance said firmly, scowling. “Last time you went off by yourself, you ran right into a giant, bloodthirsty xenomorph knockoff that could move faster than the blink of an eye and had a taste for Galra flesh! What if something happens to you?!"

“If something happens to me, then it’ll happen to you, too!” Keith replied with a matching scowl. “We can’t lose our sharpshooter, Lance, we _need_ you! _I_ need you, so you can –“ He broke off suddenly, turning away from the red paladin with a sharp twist, fists and teeth clenched.

Lance jerked back at the sudden yell, eyelashes fluttering. “Keith…” He stepped back a pace when Hunk wedged himself between them, hands raised to fend them off from each other.

“Keith is right, Lance,” Hunk said, turning toward him. “He’s pretty good at avoiding deadly stuff, especially when he doesn’t have anyone to focus on protecting. He could lead the guys chasing us away, then double back and meet up with us later on! An easy plan, with no confrontation!”

Lance pressed his lips into a thin line, eyes burning into the back of Keith’s head.

 

* * *

 

“Sending you the drone’s last known coordinates now.”

The Captain gazed out over the horizon, taking in the sight of smoking woodlands in the distance. “We’re going in after them,” they declared, voice carrying back toward the four-man team assembled behind them. 

The Second-in-Command, Fentress, rolled her eyes. She hadn’t been informed of this decision – again. “Why would we do _that_?” she asked, letting out an irritable puff. The respirator over the lower half of her face rushed to compensate the output of air, replacing her words with filtered air. “It will risk the entire operation. We already have the Voltron Lions. Their pathetic Paladins hold no value!”

The Captain stalked up to the edge of the cliff they’d landed on, squaring their shoulders as they gazed down at the five Lions, helpless against the push of the gravity beam. Fentress’ bored drawl ground against their raw nerves, but they suppressed their own annoyance with the clench of their fists. “They hold value to _me_ ,” the Captain growls, voice rumbling through their barrel-like chest. “Come on. Their head start is over, and so the hunt begins.”

The Second-in-Command stepped forward, her arguments already prepared to try and talk the Captain out of this ridiculous quest. “But, Captain –“

The Captain spins on their heel and towers above her, thunderous and furious, stopping her dead in her tracks. “I will _not_ allow my authority to be questioned, Lieutenant!” they snapped, the sharp edge of their voice cutting through the distorted filter of their own respirator. “I am the Captain of this vessel. You do as I say, or else you will be spending the rest of your miserable days on this godforsaken planet! Is that understood?”

The Second-in-Command blinked, taken aback by the unadulterated rage suddenly turned on her. An opportunist by heart, not one to look for excuses to be abandoned on a miserable volcano planet, she bowed her head. “Yes, Captain,” she said, maybe a little resentfully.

The Captain seemed pleased by her obedience, however hesitant; or, maybe, they simply ignored her obvious reluctance, too eager to focus on the task at hand. They turned back toward the skyline, eyes affixed on the Voltron Lions, still trapped on the ground. “Do not let those Lions move,” they ordered. “No one is to take them until the hunt is over.”

“Of course, Captain,” the faithful tech answered.

“And make sure the Atlas stays put,” the Captain added, an afterthought.

The Tech let a grin take over his face. “Copy that,” he replied before switching to another channel. Another Captain’s voice began to talk over the frequency, ‘Shiro’ of the IGF-Atlas.

“ _Keith, any updates on your ETA?”_ Shiro asked.

The Tech watches the frequencies flicker onscreen, a rectangular panel flashing beside them. The color of the second wavelength turned green to confirm, and he placed his four-fingered hand on the panel, giving a small cough to clear his throat. “We’re finishing some repairs,” he said. The pitch of his voice fluctuated, becoming more gravely and solemn; the voice of the Black Paladin came from his mouth as he spoke, Keith’s foreign accent masked over his own weird letters. “We’ll update our ETA when we’re en route.”

_“Copy that. Atlas will continue to rendezvous point. See you there.”_

The Tech smirked. “See you, Shiro.”

 

* * *

 

“Six Trogan meters until target!”

“Finally,” the Captain growled, unheard by the rest as they dart through the black woodlands, jumping from trunk to trunk. They reached for their waist and yanked, dual whips of crackling red electricity snapping out of the sheaths strapped to their sides. The beep in their ear indicated five Trogan meters, four, three; the Tactical Officer, a burly old Myinidae with an eye missing, drew the heavy T-21b blaster from the sling on his back, and the Second-in-Command and Pilot whipped out their own firearms, standard edition M41A pulse rifles.

One Trogan meter until target, and the ping in their ears was almost one constant, monotonous sound as they neared the clearing. From above they fell, each crew member landing on all sides of the cluster of signals – four suits of armor lay piled on the ground, their corresponding Paladins missing; every color but red, the Captain noticed with a wicked grin.

“They’ve ditched their suits!” the Pilot exclaimed, lowering his pulse rifle from where it was pointed at the abandoned armor. The Second-in-Command kicked the green helmet, sending it clattering across the ground. “ _Now_ how are we going to track them?”

“How, you ask?” The Captain deactivated their dual whips, cutting off the crackling currents with the press of a button. They chuckled darkly as they tucked the handles back into the sheaths, allowing the cloak to fall back around their broad torso. “We hunt them the good old-fashioned way.”

 

* * *

 

“Are we sure that the Lions are this way?”

“Every direction looks the same!”

Pidge growled beneath her breath as she looked in all directions, the same trees surrounding them in every which way. “Oh, what I’d give for a GPS right now,” she muttered.

Allura, walking calmly at the head of the group, glanced over her shoulder to give Pidge a reassuring smile. “We cannot allow ourselves to panic,” she declared, turning back to face forward. “Clearly, we’ve relied on our technology too much. It’s rendered us helpless!”

“Gee, Grandpa, didn’t know you felt that way,” Pidge grumbled.

“Now, kids, don’t tease your grandpa!” Lance piped up from Allura’s flank, spinning back to walk backwards. Allura sent him stumbling off to the side with a warning shove to his arm.

“We need to _focus_ in order to find our way back,” she said with a pointed look over at Lance, coming to a stop. Lance and Pidge fell silent to watch as she tilted her head up to gaze at the trees around them, eyes narrowed in concentration. Her eyebrow twitched, and she closed her eyes, letting her chin fall to her chest, mouth screwed up in thought.

After a full dobosh of silence, Allura lifted her head and shrugged. “Okay, I’m lost.”

Pidge slapped her forehead. “You spent a whole minute just thinking about how to admit it, weren’t you?” she asked, groaning at Allura’s sheepish smile.

Hunk sighed, his shoulders slumping. “What is it with grandpas and refusing to ask for directions..?”

“Guys, relax. Stop freaking out, we’re not lost.”

Pidge shot Lance a glance. “What makes you say that?” she asked sarcastically. “All these landmarks we’ve been passing? The scanner you’ve been hiding in your sleeve?”

Lance gave a relaxed shrug. “I looked at the volcano,” he said simply, pointing up at it. Solid black smoke poured from the crest, spilling up into the sky and painting the lighter gray clouds a dark charcoal. “It was on our left when we came in, now it’s that way. Therefore, the Lions must be somewhere in that direction!”

The team’s eyes sparkled.

“Lance, you’re a genius!” Allura praised.

“Oh, snap!” Hunk cheered. “Well done, Lance!” Lance put a hand on the side of his head, an unwilling grin taking control of his face. If you looked hard enough, you could see the arrogant sparkles glittering around him.

Pidge rolled her eyes, fighting against a smile of her own. “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” she said.

Predictably, Lance reacted to that. “Hey!”

His next retort was promptly cut off by the hot red laser that blasted past his head. He yelped, ducking on instinct; a faint wisp of smoke trailed up from the singed hairs on his head. “Scatter!” he shouted, rolling under another blast intended for his face. Hunk shoved Pidge away from a laser meant for her chest, sending her stumbling toward a broad-trunked tree. Allura bobbed and weaved between shots aimed for her legs, sliding to a stop beside the tree and all but falling behind it.

Lance was the last to duck into cover, wincing as the bark just beside his arm exploded in a shot of laser fire.

Allura, pressed up against his side, gasped, “More drones?!”

“No,” Lance replied grimly, leaning around the smoking side of the tree. “Worse.”

“The pirates found us!” Hunk wailed.

“How did they do that when we’re not even wearing our suits?!” Pidge asked rhetorically.

“I dunno about you, but I’m not sticking around to ask ‘em,” Lance said, extending an arm out toward the next expanse of forest ahead of them. “Let’s move, team!”

Hunk was the first to break away from cover, yelping as a laser blast made the ground explode next to his foot. Pidge and Allura surged forward at the same time, heads ducked and arms pumping. Lance was right on their tail, gasping for breath as he zigzagged, diverting most of the fire onto himself.

The terrain beneath their feet began to break off into broken-off shelves of land, slanted downward into a valley at the base of the volcano. Hunk jumped off of a high shelf, hitting the ground with a loud thump. Panic shot through him, the instant the ground shattered beneath the impact, cracks spiderwebbing out from beneath his padded feet. “Guys, don’t –!” he cried out, just as Allura landed in front of him, having taken a longer leap. The ground crumbled beneath them, turning into nothing but dust, and Pidge joined them in falling just as she hit the cracked shelf, too late to correct her fall.

“Guys?!” Lance shouted, panic high in his tone as he watched his friends disappear. He skidded a stop at the top of the last shelf, staring down in horror at the tunnel they’d fallen into, listening to their echoing screams fade away. “Guys!!”

Pain shot through his side, and he stumbled to the side, a yelp ripped from his throat as a blast singed his side, tearing his flight suit and searing the skin beneath. Lance grit his teeth, tears welling up in his eyes, and glanced back at the pirates. Their shadowy forms were quickly approaching, the glow of their blasters growing brighter as they charged up more shots, and he glanced down at the hole his friends had fallen into.

Lance jumped off of the shelf he stood on, a laser shooting just over his head as he dropped down, and hit the sloped wall of the tunnel, leaning back on his uninjured side as he slid down after his friends, yelling all the way down.

Darkness overtook his visibility, and Lance brought up a hand, trying to shield his face from stray pebbles and dust that flew up. The ground beneath his back suddenly slanted off to the right, and the sound of Pidge’s and Hunk’s voices was suddenly cut off as an offshoot of the main tunnel surrounded him. Allura’s yell rose up to solely fill his ears, and Lance felt his heart seize in panic. “Allura!?” he called.

“Lance!” she cried back up to him. A loud thud punctuated her shout, silence following after, and Lance suddenly wished that he could fall faster.

For once, his wish was granted, and a circle of light between his feet appeared, growing larger and opening up more as he rapidly approached it. Gritting his teeth, he leaned back, letting his back scrape against the wall of the tunnel, bringing his feet up to try and slow the fall any way he could.

The light at the end of the tunnel blinded him for a moment as he fell through it, and he could make out a cavern covered in dust, the broad ground rising up to greet him, and Allura’s silver bun, a spot of color against the gray ground, before he landed, too hard to remain conscious.

 

* * *

 

“ _Sorry for the delay. We’ve experienced a glitch in navigation_.”

Veronica sank back down in her seat as Curtis promptly accepted the hail. She rubbed her slightly sore muscles as Curtis replied, “Copy that, Voltron. Do you need any assistance?”

“ _No assistance required, thank you. Lance will figure it out_.”

Veronica snorted at that, Krik at the Operations Station throwing her an amused glance. “Right,” she drawled, raising her voice for Keith to hear over the transmission. “Lance, the navigation genius. And I assume Hunk will be organizing the tactical strats?”

“ _Affirmative. I will let you know when we’re approaching your coordinates_.”

The cold, clipped response struck a chord in Veronica. She spun around in her chair, meeting Curtis’ wide-eyed gaze with her own as Keith abruptly hung up, without any sort of sign-off like he usually did. Veronica felt the ice block in her stomach sink as she reluctantly asked, “How long have they been delayed?”

“They should have arrived when we did.” Curtis spun back around, fingers flying across the keypad of his station, and various signals began to appear on his monitor. Veronica stood up from her chair and crossed the bridge, leaning down behind him as he overlayed two frequencies over each other. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to the peak of one, then moving on to an odd-looking spike in the node. “The ping is different here, here and here. Almost as if…”

“It’s a decoy,” Veronica breathed, throat growing tight.

Curtis leaned forward, squinting severely. “I’ve almost got this encryption…” he muttered, reaching up to drag something across the monitor. The frequencies lit up yellow, and his eyes followed. “There it is!”

The crew assembled jolted at the sound of the Paladins’ panicked voices broke the ambiance of the bridge.

“ _Paladins, get airborne immediately! It’s a trap!”_

_“It’s just like when we were captured by those pirates!”_

_“We’re about to be captured by pirates_ again!”

Veronica’s throat tightened at the sound of Lance’s voice, a spike of ice-cold fear stabbing through her chest at the waver in his voice. Distantly, her ears heard Keith order an emergency ejection, which sent her mind racing, turning the rest into a blur.

She straightened up from Curtis’ chair and ran over to the Captain’s helm. She slammed her hand over the red alert toggle, leaning in to yell into the microphone, “All hands on deck! Captain Shirogane, Major Iverson, Coran, to the bridge immediately!” She closed the announcement channel and yelled to the bridge. “We need to save the Paladins!”

 

* * *

 

“ _Don’t think I’ve forgotten about you, tiny Paladin! I’ll make you_ pay _for what you did to me_!” The words rang in Pidge’s ears as she ran, combining with the burn of her lungs to make her head spin. The ground tilted underneath her feet, and with a yelp, she pitched off to the side, slamming into Hunk’s sturdy side. “Oof!” The larger boy stumbled under her weight thrown into him, toppling down to his knees.

Her glasses pressed into her face as she landed on Hunk’s back. Pidge bounced off of him, falling onto the ground next to him with a sick thud, dust flying up around her. She wheezed, squeezing her eyes shut as she tried to summon the strength to push herself up again. The ground spun beneath her hands as she weakly pushed it away, bringing her burning haunches beneath her and sitting back on them.

Hunk’s arms trembled as he tried to push himself up. “We have to keep going,” he gasped, collapsing back onto the ground. His back rose and fell in shallow pants as he tried to catch his breath. “They’re right behind us.”

Pidge closed her eyes, deeming the energy being conserved for seeing needed elsewhere – like thinking. “The CO2 is poisoning us by the minute,” she rasped, pausing to swallow. The dry walls of her throat burned, constricting as she tried to swallow saliva that wasn’t there. “And we don’t know where we’re going.” She picked her head up, neck flexing as she looked out, eyes following the path laid out before them. Where these tunnels came from, she could ponder later. “We can’t keep running.”

Hunk grunted with the effort of picking his own heavy head off of the ground. “What do we do, then?” he asked. With his attention diverted to Pidge, watching her pick herself off of the ground, he seemed to sit up with an almost sort of ease.

Pidge scanned the trees around them. “We have to make a stand,” she said, turning back toward him, hand outstretched for him to take. “If we can’t beat them using physical endurance, then we’ll just have to use what we have.”

Hunk noticed the glint in her tired eyes, a smile of his own appearing. “Our brains,” he finished for her, taking her hand. He paused, uncertain. “That.. is what you meant, I hope. Because it sounds pretty cool when you say it like that.”

“Yes, Hunk,” Pidge said, exasperated. “Our brains.”

“Okay, awesome. Great.”

 

* * *

 

_“Your brother isn’t here to help you this time, tiny Paladin!”_

The gruff words cut into Pidge’s concentration like a knife. She gasped a hand grabbed her roughly, too weak and startled to protest as she was yanked back into the shadows of a cluster of trees. Hunk coerced her into a crouch under his arm, giving her a gesture to be quiet with a finger on his lips. Two cloaked figures stepped onto the path they’d been running, cloaked in dark, anonymous armor. The one on the left hefted a blaster rifle around with seemingly no difficulty, even though the military-brand models the Galra equipped their foot soldiers with weighed half as much as Pidge herself did, a shot charging on the end of the barrel, aimed down at their footprints on the ground. The other one, shoulders covered in spikes, let out a chuckle that echoed in the quiet and drew a handle from his belt, gazing around the clearing with a raw hunger in his voice. “ _And I’ve upgraded since we last met_ ,” he continued, activating the weapon. Pidge’s eyes widened as a whip, crackling red with electrical plasma, flared out from the handle, a tingle of static racing through her at the memory of facing off against two of that same whip before.

“Matt is gonna love this, when I tell him,” she whispered without thinking.

Fortunately, the loud snap of their tripwire covered the sound of her voice. Hunk eagerly leaned forward as the dead trunk hurtled toward the pirates. With catlike reflexes, they hopped out of the way, pausing to chuckle at the trap. The one with the blaster let out a yelp, the gun falling out of his grasp as a rope cinched around his leg, pulling taut as it hauled him up into the air. “Huh?!” the whip-wielder gasped, backpedalling away from the apparent trap. His own foot landed in the middle of another rope, and he let out an embarrassingly girly shriek as it tightened around his own leg, suspending him in the air with his whip clattering to the ground, well out of his reach. He let out a streak of unfamiliar words that were easily recognizable as curses, even in an alien language, and thrashed against his binding.

Hunk pumped his fist. “It worked!” he said, offering his hand for a high-five. “Nice work!”

Pidge’s eyes locked onto a small device that slipped out of his pocket, falling to the ground alongside the whip. She darted out of the shadows, Hunk at her heels, and jogged over to it. She snatched it off of the ground and activated it, ducking out of the way of a furious swipe. “Found the Lions,” she gasped, closing her fist around the device and taking off in the direction the scanner indicated. “This way!”

 

* * *

 

A soothing coolness on the throbbing burn of his side gently persuaded Lance to open his eyes.

Allura sat crouched over him, her eyes taken on a faint blue glow to match the curve of her hands as she held them up against his hip, just beneath the ridge of his ribs. The worried pinch in her brow made his heart flutter.

Lance slowly brought up his hand, laid carefully across his chest, and gently brushed a stray strand of hair away from her face. “Hey, there.”

Startled, Allura jolted, tilting her head instinctively as he wound the strand behind her pointed ear. “How are you feeling, Lance?” she asked, trying to shake off the faint waver of her voice. She slid her arm beneath his back and gently helped him into a sitting position. Lance winced as his back protested, sore muscles shouting their discontent while his vertebrae popped.

“Could be better, I guess.” Suddenly feeling out of breath, he put a hand on his chest, feeling the tight burn of his lungs. “Could be breathing in oxygen instead of carbon dioxide, but, y’know. Can’t have it all, I guess.”

“I meant about getting shot, you fool.” Her brows furrowed, and a stern frown overtook her face. Lance cringed, hearing her tone grow steely. “You did not need to place yourself in danger like that, diverting the attention off of us. You could have simply kept running, they were all terrible shots from the start.”

“Stormtrooper aim,” Lance suggested. Allura’s frown deepened at the slight slur of his words.

“I don’t know what that means,” she snapped. “Lance, did Keith’s words not get through your thick skull? You are not a mere ‘diversion guy’.” She wound his arm around her shoulders and helped him stand on his woozy, wobbling legs. She eased them into a light jog, but slowed to a limping sort of walk when she merely dragged him along, padded feet lazily skidding across the ground.

“Hey, can I ask you somethin’?” Lance asked, his head falling onto her shoulder as they hobbled along. “How come you can still breathe??”

“Three lungs,” she answered shortly. Her breathing was beginning to grow a bit shallower from the abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in addition to the strain of lugging Lance along, but her respiratory system could process it much easier than humans. “Now, let’s continue to focus on…”

“Wow, my girlfriend has three lungs, so she can breathe carbon dioxide and not die.” Lance let his head roll back as he chuckled. “That’s something I never thought I’d say. I always figured I’d have somebody with two regular ol’ lungs. I’m in love with an alien princess, Ma, she’s got three lungs!”

Allura frowned. “You must have head damage. I’m no longer a princess.”

“You’re right. You’re a queen.” Lance brought his hand up, wrist limp, and lightly touched the tip of her nose with his dangling fingers. “You’re _my_ queen, and I promise to always treat you like one.”

A flush spread across her face, originating from the light tap of his finger. “Lance…” she said, hushed with solemnity as her gut twisted sharply. The crack of dead wood made her spine go ramrod-straight in fear, and the dark chuckle that ensued caused the atmosphere to shift into something heavy with tension. “Please stop talking.”

“I’m glad my _Mami_ likes you,” he crooned, turning his head to face her. His nose pressed into her cheek. “Everybody likes you, even Sylvio. He’s a tough nut to crack, when it comes to strangers, but he wouldn’t stop talking about you when I got home.”

“Lance, please,” she urged, but he pursed his lips against her skin, his mouth making a quiet smack as he planted a kiss there. Her skin tingled, a flush spreading across her face. “We need to go.”

“You make me feel queasy, but in a good way,” Lance said softly, no hint of the previous slur in his voice. Sincerity radiated from his words, spoken right next to her sensitive ear. “Like I used to feel, back before Keith left.”

“Lance, stop!” Allura shoved him away, the whining charge of a blaster reaching her ears. Lance stumbled away from her, falling to his knees just as the shot fired, soaring over his head. Allura dodged under another blast intended for her own head, and jumped over to him. “We need to go, now!” she shouted, yanking him up to his feet and giving him a hard push forward. “Try to focus!” she called up to him, relieved to watch him break into a sprint without falter.

Lance pumped his arms, fueled by the sudden danger. His mind continued to spin with the lack of oxygen, the ground tilting beneath his feet, but he ground his teeth together until his jaw ached, the dull pain giving his mind clarity. He watched the bouncing horizon, the smoldering volcano capturing his attention. His brain lit up with the recollection of his thoughts from earlier; _I just followed the volcano_...

“Let’s go left!” he called back over his shoulder, leaning into the tilt of the ground and veering off of the path. He jumped over a hurdle of dense purple brambles, hedged along the fringe of the dead forest. “So the smoke is going off to the west! That’s the way the Lions are!”

“Lance, are you sure?!” Allura yelled after him, her pounding footsteps right behind him, two more sets echoed behind them.

“Never been more sure in my life!” he shouted back, taking another high stride over another bushel of thorns. “Keep running!”

The dead trees up ahead parted on either side, leading open to a wide valley covered in ash. Lance’s eyes picked up the familiar shape of a plateau, and trailed his gaze off to the left of it. His heart jumped into his throat at the sight of five familiar machines, prone on the ground, pinned by the same tractor beam. “There they are!” he called out. “The Lions, they’re –“

The wall of brambles just up to the right exploded, and a shadowy form leaped out. Lance’s eyes widened, and he tried to correct his path, but the ash beneath his feet had no frictional give, sending him sliding right into the ambush.

Pain exploded in the center of his face as a heavy fist struck him, a sickly crack echoing in his ears. A cry of pain was torn from his throat as he was knocked back, collapsing onto his back. He lay wheezing on the ground, what little breath he had knocked from him, eyes watering and head throbbing. “Allura!” he croaked, rolling onto his front and pushing himself up. A wide hand gripped the back of his head and shoved him back down, pinning him. Stars exploded behind his eyes when his head struck stone. His chest heaved, and he coughed fruitlessly, trying to breathe as a sharp weight – someone’s knee, he faintly recognized – dug  in between his shoulder blades. “Run!” he rasped, trying to fight against the hand on his head, twisting it so that his windpipe was constricted enough to choke him.

A blaster whined nearby, echoed by a dry chuckle. “Looks like she left,” the pirate taunted, gesturing to the empty clearing. His smirking visage swam into focus, the muted color of his stripes falling into a familiar pattern. Lance squinted, trying to recall where he’d seen that same sort of spindly antenna-like appendage; his head didn’t seem to be functioning properly, too overwhelmed with pain and grief in his loneliness. The alien hefted the blaster up, pointing the firing end at Lance’s forehead. “But don’t worry,” he soothed, fingering the trigger, “we’ll find her for you.”

An odd sort of calm washed over Lance, the sharp aching of his wounds fading into a dull throb. The blaster charged up with a whining sound, muffled by the fugue state he’d slipped into. He raced through his prayers, quelling the fear in his heart, and fell still under the pirate’s pinning grasp, no longer fighting in the face of oblivion.

Maybe he’d get to come back as pink jacaranda, he mused, a faint smile crossing over his face.

Suddenly, a sharp impact cut through his moment of serenity, and the sound of a body falling heavily upon the ground made Lance’s eyes shoot open. Allura, her skin and hair tinted the same saturated gray-purple as the trees surrounding them, hefted the striped pirate – Ezor, Lance remembered in a stroke of brilliance – off of the ground and spun around with him, throwing him toward Lance. The grip on his head loosened, a comical whimper of ‘uh-oh’ uttered by the accomplice, and Lance flattened himself back down to the ground, feeling the rush of air around him as the striped pirate knocked into the other one.

Lance scrambled up onto his feet, stumbling over to where Allura stood, still crouched in a battle pose. Panting heavily, he looked back to where the pirates lay entangled with each other – unconscious. “Thanks,” he wheezed, looking up at her, his smile sloping off to the side. "You saved me."

She offered him a tiny smile, her colors returning to their natural state. “I will always be here, as long as you'll have me,” she replied, offering him a hand.

Lance's smile grew, eyes watering again. "I think I'll keep you around," he joked weakly, and reached up to take her hand.

Just as she pulled him up to his feet, the ground began to rumble around them. Lance all but tumbled into her side, arms haphazardly thrown around her neck for support, hers grabbing at his waist. In unison, they looked up at the sky, matching smiles lighting up their ashen – and, in Lance’s case, injured – faces.

“The Atlas!” Allura breathed, the words leaving her in a rush of relief.

Tears prickled in Lance’s eyes. “They made it!” he cried, sagging against her as his knees buckled.

The end of the flagship’s hull began to glow, the ionic beams charging up. A yellow ray fired from the cannons; an electromagnetic pulse, aimed right for the warship pinning down their Lions. The beam struck true, yellow sparks cracking across the hull of the warship, and the lights all died at once, the ship slowly tilting to the side as it lost altitude and crashed into the planet’s dusty surface.

 

* * *

 

A loud crash made Fentress pause in her steadfast wake behind the Captain. She turned in place, watching the ship plummet from the sky, the hull still sparking with electromagnetic charges. Harrumphing, she faced forward once more and hefted her blaster into a ready hold, continuing after the Captain.

“Squadron Zedlox, come in,” she said into her comm. unit. Distant sounds traveled through the device, frustrated groans and vulgarities; with a sneer, she adjusted frequencies. “Squadron Erto, come in,” she said with a note of frustration. Static-tinged silence greeted her second hailing. With a groan, Fentress stopped her pace behind the Captain. “The other pirates are offline, and HQ is…” She paused to leer over her shoulder, eyes finding the plume of smoke from the crashed ship trickling up into the horizon. “...preoccupied.” She paused to glance up at the sky, her irritation mounting.

The Captain continued their trek, opting for silence as their answer.

She tightened her grip around her blaster and glared at their broad back, spitting out, “I never signed up for the position as your escort, _sir_. I signed up for treasure, not a wrecked ship and a captured crew.”

The Captain halted. “Well,” they said simply, “you’re in it now.”

Fentress could only gawk at the gall, staring after the determined Captain as they marched up the steep slope leading to the smoking crater of the volcano. “You’ve got some nerve,” she remarked. “It’s… almost admirable.”

“Are you coming or not?” the Captain asked, sounding annoyed for the first time since Fentress signed up for their mission.

Fentress smirked. “Sure thing, _sir_.”

 

* * *

 

Shiro kept his eyes firmly on the pirates as security took them into custody, fastening their arms behind them and walking them into the brig cells. The striped pirate – a Myinidae, Veronica had informed him – had flakes of red blood on his leathery gloves. Shiro’s frown twitched as he glanced over at the mobile medical unit, Lance laying on a gurney, eyes shimmering with tears of pain as the field medic gingerly dabbed away the blood dried around his crooked nose, a vascular regenerator held in the other hand. Another medic crouched down near his legs, holding a dermal repair gun over the blistered skin over his hip. Veronica sat on his right side, murmuring comforts to him, while the other Paladins stood out of the doctors’ way, their own minor wounds repaired by field medics. Sans Keith, he noticed, eyes darkening.

“Sophisticated hacking and jamming abilities. Impressive.”

A smarmy voice pulled him out of his thoughts. The hacker behind the scenes stood with four guards flanking him, chin cocked up despite the restraints placed on him. He eyed Shiro like a predator, a cocksure glint in his eye. “It’s nice to finally find others on my level,” he boasted.

Shiro felt slimy just standing near him. “Yeah, it’s terrific,” he muttered, displeased at his forces being compared to the likes of a criminal who’d breached the Olkari government, stole their top-secret projects, and sold them to space vigilantes just for the sake of creating chaos. “Now, where’s your leader?”

The hacker smirked. “I don’t know,” he said simply. “I lost contact with her when you attacked us. But she’s out there somewhere, hunting down the one you call ‘Keith’.”

Shiro narrowed his eyes. “And who exactly –“

“Wait, wait, wait a minute.” A chorus of protests rose from the side, and Shiro looked away to see Lance sit up from the gurney, fighting against the hands trying to push him back down. He looked ridiculous, with the nasal speculum keeping his nostrils flared, but the glint in his eyes was a spark of concern. “They’re hunting down Keith?” he asked, his voice a little too high-pitched to sound normal. Veronica spoke to him in rapid Spanish, tugging at his arm to try and persuade him to lay back down, but he shrugged off her arm and stared at the hacker with wide, fearful eyes. “Who exactly _is_ your leader?”

 

* * *

 

Fentress pressed her back up against the porous rock shelf, eagerly peering over the top of it. Her eyes caught a smudge of white just a few Trogan meters away, red accents muffled by the thick gray smoke surrounding the crater. The Paladin – Keith, she’d heard Apurva say once – was sitting still, presumably resting from his exhausting climb up the volcano: the perfect time to strike, Fentress decided, and crept around the curved edge of her cover, rifle held at the ready.

She barely had time to realize that the Paladin was not in his armor before her world went black.

Keith surged forward to catch her body as she fell limp, head lolling back in his hold. He grunted under her weight – a fully-armored Galra was heavy, even with his atypically human strength – and gently leaned her up against a nearby boulder, extracting the rifle from her hands and dismantling it with a stuttering difficulty. There was a reason he’d always handed off his firearms for Lance to practice dismantling during their downtime at the Garrison, but he paused to think that maybe he shouldn’t have.

Just as he launched the power core up and over the lip of the crater, the whine of another blaster made him freeze. He instinctively spun around, muscles tense.

The pirate did not move; they simply stood there, staring at him, the thick atmosphere between them mounting. Keith’s eyes flickered down to their hands on the rifle, watching their gloved hands tighten around the stock and barrel of the blaster, tight enough for the leathery-material to squeak.

“Are you gonna try shooting me or what?!” Keith finally snapped, dropping into a battle stance. “Or are you just gonna stare at me until I attack you first?!”

“Sorry if you’re growing impatient, Paladin,” the pirate growled, their voice no more than a deep rumble born in their barrel-like chest. “I’m simply relishing the moment.”

“What _moment_?” Keith snapped. “I don’t have _moments_ with people who are aiming a gun at me.”

“The moment where I finally make you pay for what you’ve done.” To Keith’s shock, the pirate slowly activated the safety on the rifle, removed the ammunition core from the barrel, and tossed both of them off to the side. Keith crouched lower when they raised their trembling hands up to their head, thumbing away the clasps of their mask and gingerly pulling it off with a hiss of air.

The mask fell to the ground between their feet. They kicked it away with an idle jerk of their foot, sending it skittering across the rocky terrain.

Keith gaped, his heart sinking. “ _Zethrid_..?”

Zethrid tilted her head back to suck in a deep breath of air, feeling the novel sensation of hot air against her raw, clammy skin. “You took Ezor from me,” she began, voice trembling with rage as she slowly stopped oppressing it, letting it combine with her festering grief. “You _took_ Ezor from me!” she bellowed, stomping forward. Keith backpedalled, gasping and jumping out of the way as she reared back, smashing her heavy fists into the volcanic rock. Dust exploded from the impact, a cloud of soot and shrapnel raining down around her.

Keith tucked into a roll to escape the area, jumping up and backpedalling away from her as she yanked her fists out of the craters she’d created and spun toward him, rushing toward him. He grasped for his lower back, where Krolia’s knife was sheathed; he pulled it out and swung it, summoning the blade in a flash of purple. The flash did little to blind Zethrid as she charged, arm reared back for a punch to the face.

He dodged beneath her swinging fist, dancing away to slice at her head. With alarming speed, she ducked under the blade and advanced as he backpedalled toward a boulder, trying to grab at him with her left hand, bringing up her other fist to land a sucker punch to his abdomen. Keith just barely managed to dodge the heavy hit, bending away from her arm. Pebbles struck his back as the boulder exploded, and he hopped back a pace, using the flat of the blade to block a blow to his side. Her gauntlet-covered fist struck the blade with a clang of metal, orange sparks flying; Keith winced as the recoil traveled down his arm, making his nerves tingle almost painfully. Gritting his teeth through the pain, he grunted and sliced for the fur-covered side of her face, where the nerve endings were still functional, unlike the scarred half of her face.

Zethrid grasped his wrist just as the blade nicked the bottom of her large, bat-like ear, squeezing until Keith felt his joints grind together. Fueled by his cry of pain, Zethrid grinned maliciously and yanked his arm up, pulling him forward into her leg as she kicked his legs out from under him, sending him flying in an uncontrollable spin.

Keith landed hard on his back, the breath flying from his burning lungs as he bounced across the ground. Rolling onto his front, he struggled to push himself up, gasping for breath among the noxious gases emitted by the volcano; _89% CO2, 10% oxygen, 1% trace elements of nitrogen, methane, sulfur and helium_ , his brain recalled in a voice that sounded like Pidge. “Not the time!” he wheezed to himself, jumping to his feet as Zethrid sprinted toward him, a primal shout ringing in his ears.

Zethrid spun on her heel, kicking up toward his head. Keith ducked under her leg, predictably, and she pulled her motion in, turning her momentum from the kick into a punch that clocked him hard in the jaw. His teeth clacked together, head thrown back by the blow, and his vision whited out for a split second; long enough for him to catch the second fist hurtling toward his face, too quickly for him to effectively block. She powered through his arm, flung up with no real muscle behind it, and hit him square in the face, sending him flying backwards. He bounced across the rocky ground, too dazed to stop himself from rolling. The ground dropped out from under him, and he slid down a small incline, stumbling to his feet at the bottom of it. He spun around just as Zethrid made her own descent, leaping off halfway down to swing for his head again, once, twice. She launched herself at him with a caterwaul, and Keith rolled out of the way, soot flying up to coat him as the rocky side of the shelf exploded.

Panting, Keith watched her carefully. The dust settled, and he found her glaring at him. A cold shiver raced down his spine at the insane hatred gleaming in her good eye, fixated right on him. Before she could fully recover, Keith gripped the pommel in both hands and reared it over his left shoulder, rushing toward her with a battle cry. Zethrid parried it with her gauntlet, sparks flying off of the metal glove, and swung for his opening. She caught him hard in the ribs, knocking the breath out of him, and while he hunched over, she crouched to surge up, knocking him back with a bone-shattering elbow to his chest.

The porous rock scraped against his face as he rolled, sliding to a stop near the foot of a slope leading over the mouth of the volcano. Zethrid ran toward him, jumping off of the shelf, fists reared up for another pounding blow meant to crush every bone in his body. The ground cracked as she landed, rocks exploding out of the ground, and her scream of pure rage echoed across the volcanic crater.

The ash settled, revealing Keith’s lithe figure standing closer to the edge of the overhang. He stumbled a step to the side, favoring the leg that she’d kicked earlier. Tangled hair stuck glued to his forehead, and he reached up with his right wrist to try and push it away, gasping to breathe in the sweltering air. “I don’t know... what you think I did,” he called out to her, unable to hide the pained rasp of his voice.

“You took away everything!” Zethrid accused, the signs of her own exhaustion beginning to show. She panted raggedly, shoulders heaving. She swallowed thickly, and her voice broke with tears. “And now my face will be the last thing you ever see!”

Keith tensed as she charged forward, gripping his sword in both hands. He swung it toward her; she gripped both of his hands over the handle, her massive hands dwarfing his own. She twisted his arms until his left hand left the blade, then parted his arms, jerking his right wrist until the bones popped. The blade fell out of his limp hand, skittering out of reach. His eyes followed it as it skidded close to the edge, heart jumping into his throat as it hung over the side, perilously close to falling off. Zethrid’s huge hand grabbed him by the neck, choking the shriek out of him as she hefted him up above her, watching him struggle with seething hatred in her eyes.

“Zeh… please, don’t…” Keith clawed at her hand, trying to pry his fingers beneath her vicegrip, kicking his legs to try and earn any inch of wiggle room, but she held firmly onto his neck, unmovable. “Ple… Zeth… _don’t_ …!”

“Why shouldn’t I?” Zethrid leered. “Does it hurt? Knowing you’ll never see the blue one’s face again?” Keith’s eyes welled up, and she clenched her teeth, squeezing tighter. His back arched, insurmountable pain locked around his neck. “Never seeing your fearless leader? Your friends? Your family? Doesn’t it _hurt_ more than anything, _Keith_?”

Keith’s eyes stung, tears streaming down his face at the violent lack of air. “Yes!” he gasped. “I’m… sor..”

Zethrid’s lip peeled back into a leer. “ _Sorry_ won’t bring her back.” The rush of air overhead made her look away from the struggling human in her grasp. Keith was able to make out the blurry shape of an MFE fighter sailing overhead, the sound of its engines roaring through the thick, poisonous air.

Zethrid lowered Keith onto the ground, loosening her grip on his neck. Keith nearly keeled over, his chest threatening to explode as he desperately sucked in air. He stumbled as Zethrid tugged hard on his arm, yanking him against her broad chest and locking her elbow around his head, allowing just enough space for him to breathe.

Shadowy silhouettes jumped down from the shelf they’d been fighting on, and Zethrid reached for her waist, pulling out and activating a handheld phaser.

“Zethrid!” Acxa called out. “Don’t do this!”

“Let him go!” the Atlas Captain commanded. 

 “I knew you’d come for him.” Zethrid chuckled, a deep, dark, twisted sound, and placed the hot end of the phaser against the side of Keith’s head. “Now you’ll all feel what I felt.”

“It’s over, Zethrid,” Axca continued, as if Zethrid hadn’t spoke. “You’re surrounded. There’s no way out of this, except surrender.”

“You think that deters me, Axca?” Zethrid asked wryly. “Now that Ezor’s gone, I welcome death at any opportunity.”

Behind her tinted visor, Axca’s face crumpled. She wracked her brain to try and figure out a way to get through to her friend – former-friend, she supposed. “Zethrid…” she said softly. “I know you hurt. Ezor hurt, too. That’s why she left you. She couldn’t keep holding on to the anger anymore!”

At the name, the muscles around the husk of Zethrid’s left eye twitched. “Stop!” she snarled.

“Hear my words!” Axca took a bold step forward. The perturbed Zethrid backpedalled, Keith’s feet dragging across the ground as she stepped back. “Remember when we first met? When we began working together? We were united in our pain of rejection, of our heritage being looked down upon. Dirty half-breeds denied by our own people. Dirty half-breeds that Lotor manipulated, used as tools.”

She advanced another pace, and panic flashed across Zethrid’s face, sending her back another step. “That’s not true!” she shouted.

“He led us all down a path of pain, a cycle of neverending loss for the sake of his own half-baked experiments!” Axca’s voice turned sour, bitter distaste for Lotor filling her mouth. She took another step, fists clenched at her sides. “You have the chance to break that cycle with us, Zethrid!” she pleaded. “With me. With Ezor! She wants you to leave your pain behind!”

The pistol trembled against the side of Keith’s head. “I’m too far gone, Axca!” Zethrid cried out, tightening her grip on Keith. “She’ll never take me back!”

Axca held up her hands, watching her friend’s face contort with the struggle of emotion. “Don’t let the rage control you!”

Zethrid narrowed her eyes. “All I have left,” she uttered, turning the pistol away from Keith and glaring at her down the shortened barrel, “is revenge.”

Axca’s face fell as the pistol began to charge up, the plasma within glowing brighter as the power condensed. At the height of its charge, Zethrid’s finger on the trigger, Axca felt glimpses of her life flash in front of her eyes – she cringed away from a bolt of blue light, fired at the edge of her periphery. Axca stumbled to the side, eyes squeezed shut to prepare for the pain of being shot, but it never came.

The scrape of rock and a scream of terror reached her ears. Axca’s eyes shot open, watching Shiro sprint toward the edge of the crater, where Keith’s battered body was flattened and hanging over the edge, his upper half leaned over the cliffside.  

Zethrid swung midair, suspended by an arm clutching her wrist. She cracked open her eyes, looking up at the human paladin she’d shown no mercy mere minutes ago, his bruised face contorted in pain. “Zethrid!” he hissed through clenched teeth, short, sharp puffs of breath escaping his flared nostrils. His human compatriot – the one called Shiro, the captain – leaned down from his side, reaching down for her. “Your other hand! Shiro can – _gah_!!”

His grasp on her wrist slipped, a raw scream escaping him as his shoulder jerked, dislocating with a painful pop. Zethrid glanced down at her dangling feet, time slowing as she watched a bubble of lava rupture on the surface, then looked back up at the humans, at the Captain’s outstretched hand.

In their eyes, kindness burned like fire, quickly dwindling like dying coals. “ _Let them burn_ ," her mind whispered to her, Ezor's voice soft and sweet in her ear.

“As you wish... Ezor.” Zethrid closed her eyes and opened her fingers, feeling Keith's arm jerk. He let out another long, drawn-out screech of pain, and his fingers slipped from around her wrist. Just as his hand fell limp, unable to remain closed anymore, the Captain surged forward, grabbing onto her gauntlet-covered gloves with both of his hands. Activating the thrusters on his suit, he let out a shout of effort, and heaved her up over the overhang, flipping her over onto her back. Zethrid landed hard on the ground, her armor unable to keep the breath from being robbed from her lungs.

The Captain grabbed her arms and rolled her over, dropping his sharp knee onto her back to pin her as he locked detainment cuffs on her wrists, talking in a tight, stern tone that suggested that she provoked someone that wasn't easy to provoke. He raised his head and barked a command. "Take her to the brig, third level." Zethrid twisted her head up, chin flat against the ground, and counted six pairs of legs as they ran toward her, hefting her off of the ground and guiding her toward the Coalition flagship. A familiar blur rushed past her, blue accents jumping out to her, but Zethrid did not need to twist to watch him go; the urgency in his voice as he called, "Keith!", and his sleek sniper rifle, placed on the boulder he'd shot her from, supervision forgotten in attendance to his gravely wounded leader - his friend, teammate, partner... _His Ezor_ , Zethrid thought, a little deliriously.

Just for the fun of it, Zethrid stopped walking, and jerked against the humans' hold to see them. Blue fell to his knees beside Keith's crumpled form, mouth moving rapidly, hands gingerly touching him. Keith coughed, body heaving in the aftermath, and looked up at him with a dazed gleam in his eye, a small smile on his bruised face.

Zethrid let loose a sharp, short laugh, the knot in her chest loosening; Ezor's high-pitched giggling joined her.

“You have the right to remain silent!” one of the officers snapped, giving her a rude shove. “I suggest you use it.”

 

* * *

 

“So, Captain. What’s your sentence looking like?”

Zethrid gave a clipped hum of acknowledgement. “For everything I’ve done? A lifetime in containment, little to no chance of bail.”

Apurva, her hacker, nodded. “Impressive work, sir. Y’know, I got two lifetimes with zero chance of bail.”

Zethrid rolled her eyes at his superiority; like she couldn’t crush his pathetic little twig body with one hand. “I thought I heard Captain Shirogane offering you a position in the engine room as long as you accept rigorous behavioral counseling?”

Apurva bristled comically. “Hey, you were sleeping! How did you know that?!”

Zethrid scoffed in disgust. A faint sound caught her attention; the measured, even pace of footsteps approaching from down the corridor. She rolled her broad shoulders and leaned back against the wall, crossing her ankles out in front of her as a figure appeared in front of their holding cell.

“This is your third visit this quintant, Acxa,” she growled. “You waste your time. When will you realize?”

“As soon as you realize that I’m not Acxa.” A raspy voice scraped against her functional eardrum, and Zethrid allowed her lips to pull back into a mirthless grin. She raised her head from where it hung against her chest. Keith stood on the other side of the holding cell, bruised and exhausted-looking; he looked awful, even with the miraculous benefits of the Altean healing technology. His wrist was firmly wrapped, like hers, and his sword-wielding arm was in a sling, shoulder popped back into its socket. A faint outline of her hand darkened his neck and chin, and the stiff way he moved and breathed indicated anything, his ribs were bruised, if not broken or fractured.

“What are you doing out of the medical wing, red one?” she growled, a note of mocking in her voice.

Keith pressed his lips into a thin line. “I want to ask you to give me a chance to talk,” he said. “I’m not gonna try and coerce you into strenuous grief counseling, like Acxa, or have you locked up for another lifetime for hurting me so bad, like Shiro.” He chuckled, a singular sound accompanied by a jerk of his head. “You really made him mad, you know. It takes a lot to piss him off as bad as you did, I’m impressed.”

“I don’t want or need your approval, little man,” she snarled. “If you want to talk, then talk. I’m a prisoner for life, after all, not your friend.”

He rolled his eyes at her abrasive dismissal. “I want you to join the Coalition,” he said simply. “Donate your services to good, instead of bad. Help us free planets from Galra control, stabilize the people being oppressed, lend your skills to us instead of… You know, using them for pirating.”

“You want me to join you?” Zethrid laughed dryly, rising from the hard bench she sat on. Apurva shrank into the corner as she approached the cell wall, towering over the paladin, who calmly tilted his head back to gaze up at her. “After I tried to riddle you with holes, beat you into nothing but pulp, throw you into a volcano during a hostage situation, and blast a hole in your skull to negotiate, you want _me_. To join _you_?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” Keith said.

Zethrid laughed again, a single bitter sound. “I must have hit your puny head too hard! Because you’re out of your mind if you believe I’ll even _consider_ such a thing!”

Keith shrugged with his good shoulder, wincing at the slight movement. “Maybe you did hit me too hard. Lance thought I was still high on painkillers when I ran it by him. But wouldn’t that be better than spending the rest of your life and them some in this tiny room, or – even worse – being forced to share your feelings with other people?”

He turned away from the cell and began to walk away, without waiting to hear her response. “Call me when you make a choice,” he said, idly waving over his good shoulder, pausing at the gate to let the quartermaster allow him exit.  Zethrid stared at his back until his vanished from sight and only then did she turn back to the bench, walk back over to it, and sit, numbness slowly filling her.

In the heavy quiet left behind, Apurva let out a little whine. “How come you got two offers and I only got one..?”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Krik is my name for the green, messy-looking alien that works on the atlas bridge. i couldn't find ANY information on them whatsoever, so i lifted a name from vehicle voltron (krik from air team) and applied it to them. if anyone knows anything about them, let me know, i looked EVERYWHERE and found NOTHING
> 
> Apurva is the narcissistic olkari hacking genius/freelancer w a superiority complex, taken from a hindu name meaning 'novel or unrivaled', so there's that. i made my own little backstory for him and everything (he worked for the olkari goverment as their top scientists, but he got bored [an einstein complex] and stole some of their projects to sell to pirates/the galra/the highest contender
> 
>  
> 
> sorry i skipped over some episodes. the entire first half of s8 felt like filler. and not good filler, either, like. meaningless fluff that's meant to pad run-time. so i chose one of the best eps in the season, The Grudge, which was. so good upon first watch, even though i had some grievances with it. out of all of the episodes, this one, day 47 (which IS useless filler but i love ryan kinkade more than life itself so whatever), and shadows (which i won't even be putting in this series bc i'm giving u readers the confused paladins' perspective). but this one contains the foundation of some plot in the filler episodes, so i decided to start w this one
> 
> anyway, i suppose i'm doing this season 8 rewrite after all. albeit, very very.....very.....slowly. thank you for reading, if you stuck it til the end :') i love u, you reading this


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